What We Lost With Ahmed Wali Karzai

The funeral yesterday for President Hamid Karzai's murdered brother was as dramatic as funerals get in Afghanistan -- the president threw himself on his dead brother's grave, Helmand governor Gulab Mangal narrowly escaped a roadside bomb on his way to show his respect, and there was lots of wailing and rending of garments. But beyond the personal grief for the president, and the somewhat obvious question of what comes next, there is a deeper loss to contemplate in Kandahar.

Within 36 hours of one brother being killed, Hamid Karzai appointed another one to take his place. It had all the usual trappings of a traditional ceremony: the old political rivals like Gul Agha Sherzai wrapping Shah Wali Karzai's head in a turban, intonations to unity and condolence, and so forth. And it is, indeed, traditional to have a son or a brother take up the duty of a murdered relative.

If the ultimate goal of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is a working government that can safeguard national interests, then solidifying one family's control over the province is not how you do it.

The problem with such an arrangement is that it demonstrates just how hollow the American mission in the south really is. Beyond the narrow mission of defeating al Qaeda, President Obama has defined success in Afghanistan as, in part, strengthening "the capacity of Afghanistan's Security Forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future." In a way, appointing Ahmed Wali's brother to take up his post is a very Afghan thing to do. But it's not a terribly sustainable thing to do.

Ahmed Wali was on his way
to becoming the next governor of Kandahar. Even the Sherzai family,
which has traditionally competed with the Karzai's for influence in the
province, were petitioning President Karzai to appoint Ahmed Wali as the
next governor. There were very good reasons for this move: since his
election to head the provincial council in 2005 (Ahmed Wali is the most
popular leader in Southern Afghanistan, one of the few in the country
who can be said to have achieved his post through legitimate popular
voting), Ahmed Wali has solidified his position
as the King of Kandahar with American assistance. It makes sense that
he should have transitioned from being the most powerful man in the
province to being its official ruler.

The problem with the
reliance on Ahmed Wali, however, is that it is deeply against any normal
traditions of government. Even the "bottom-up" governance projects the
military has undertaken rely, even if vaguely, on pantomimes to
institutions, laws, and process. While Afghans intuitively accept
hereditary inheritance of positions of power, there's no real legal
structure to make them official, aside from the President appointing a
replacement (which brings us back to the interesting question of whether
Shah Wali will be able to command the same electoral popularity Ahmed
Wali did).

If the ultimate goal of the U.S. mission in
Afghanistan, and for that sake Hamid Karzai's survival strategy, is a
working government that can safeguard national interests, then
solidifying one family's control over the province is not how you do it.
In 2004, Gul Agha Sherzai, the abusive thug who ran Kandahar into such
disarray in the mid-90s that the Taliban emerged as a popular resistance
movement, was transferred from his governorship in Kandahar to the
governorship in Nangarhar. He was meant to replace Haji Din Muhammed, an
old mujahideen commander who was widely believed to be corrupt and
ineffective.

The Sherzai family had been prominent in Kandahar
for years, and, despite disruption by the Taliban for a few years,
continued to exert a lot of influence and control over province-wide
politics. By removing Gul Agha to a province hundreds of miles away,
Hamid Karzai cleared the way for his own half-brother to ascend to
prominence in the city. Ahmed Wali's association with his half-brother
President allowed him to become the main power broker in Kandahar,
controlling literally billions of dollars in ISAF programs over the
years and acting as a veto authority on all appointments and official
actions.

At the same time, Ahmed Wali was charismatic,
devastatingly charming in person, and skilled at doling out money,
resources, access, and favors to make a huge number of Kandaharis either
dependent or grateful. In some ways, Ahmed Wali's method of rule was Afghan
politics -- reliant on personality, favors, patronage, occasional acts
of intimidation or violence, lots of shady business deals to secure a
personal fortune. But it was also antithetical to the rule of law,
sustainable governance, and even long-term security.

Despite the appointment of Shah Wali Karzai, there is a brewing contest
over who will control Kandahar moving forward. Not only the Sherzai
family, but a constellation of second-order gangsters, thugs, and
strongmen will be vying to secure what's left of Ahmed Wali's business
and political empire. For the last five years, the International
Community, rather than trying to put into place the fundamentals for a
government based on the rule of law( actual laws that literate people
can read, a functioning police force that isn't just a lightly armed
backup for the Army, bureaucrats, services, taxation, land registries,
functioning courts, and so on), they chose instead to rely on Ahmed Wali
to get things done on their artificially short, politically expedient
time frames. And for a while, it worked.

Now that Ahmed Wali
Karzai is dead and buried, however, the same fundamental challenge that
faced the international community in 2002 is still there, looking
menacing and looming over any hope of a sensible, peaceful withdrawal:
an ineffective government, ignorance by the western technocrats in
charge of crafting the international response, and a persistent laziness
that waves its hands at the complexity of Kandahar's power
relationships and wishes, earnestly, for the brown people to sort it out
themselves hopefully without too much bloodshed.

To come back to
this blog's main theme, our mission in southern Kandahar started out
painfully ignorant of the region's politics. And in the many long years
since we arrived, we've not advanced our understanding to any real
degree. And so, Kandahar's normal life of rule-by-thug looks set to
continue against the backdrop of an America in retreat, wondering what
it really accomplished.Image Credit: Ahmad Nadeem / Reuters

Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. He is also a member of the Young Atlanticist Working Group.
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Joshua's research focuses on the role of market-oriented development strategies in post-conflict environments, and on the development of metrics in understanding national security policy. He has written on strategic design for humanitarian interventions, decision-making in counterinsurgency, and the intelligence community's place in the national security discussion. Previous to joining ASP, Joshua worked for the U.S. intelligence community, where he focused on studying the non-militant socio-cultural environment in Afghanistan at the U.S. Army Human Terrain System, then the socio-cultural dynamics of irregular warfare movements at the National Ground Intelligence Center, and later on political violence in Yemen for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Joshua is a columnist for PBS Need to Know, and blogs about Central and South Asia at the influential blog Registan.net. A frequent commentator for American and global media, Joshua appears regularly on BBC World, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.